Rise of the Machine
Curation in the Age of Big Data
The Information Age is upon us.
AI is much better at sifting through vast amounts of data, extracting value and identifying complex patterns than Humans are. A merge is happening; Where more and more of money markets are being weighted by algorithms and code, and traded by high-frequency bots.
This is a time of flooding information, endless media feeds and doom-scrolling.
Advantage
The edge now available to Humans is discernment.
The exponential rate at which content, code and data will accrue is astronomical. We are truly on the upward slope of an exponential boom. It’s important to remember, though, that not all information is created equal.
This is where our edge as humans will inevitably emerge.
Those who don’t get sucked into the hyper-engrossing feed of endless animations, quickshot reels and dopamine fueling blinking lights will be shaping the future. To discern and curate are our most valuable resources moving forward.
Quality
“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” ~William A. Foster
The Portal Fund was founded with the prime directives of valuing Quality over Quantity. We curate projects based on a long term viability and a vision to shape the future growth of the emerging digital industry on the whole. We offer this service to our investors based on an unwavering belief that the cream rises to the top.
Alpha is edge is quality.
Silence is patience is skill.
Everything functions as a wave. During a rising tide, all ships move. In this information age where the tide is rising, the only option to find consistent and profitable opportunities is an ability to take a step back and take time to digest.
Curation
As such, this article will cover a curated list of the emerging projects that our Fund has either invested in, or is considering investing in. It seems obvious to us, as it probably will even more so in hindsight, that our current technological progress leads to one place: Compute and access to it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331201/nvidia-share-price-development-monthly/
The above graph shows the growth of Nvidia’s stock over the last decade and a half. We can look at this chart as a proxy for rising computational demand. Why? Nvidia is a company that builds and provides computational hardware.
The demand for more and more compute power is essential to growing the entire Artificial Intelligence industry and by association, the digital economy.
Thesis
Compute is the new Gold. Compute is the new Oil.
So… what does that mean for Crypto?
Web3, as it is now commonly referred, is highly aligned with Artificial Intelligence. Blockchains provide an immutable record for data and allow a more open network effect, sharing compute and democratization of access to all.
Our basic idea is that investing in the shovel makers of this new gold rush will pay highest dividends.
Opportunities
“Bittensor is not just a blockchain; it's a groundbreaking network that fosters decentralized intelligence, where a consensus mechanism rewards the creation and sharing of AI models. This neural network of nodes, maintained by independent miners, promotes a cooperative space for AI services to be developed and utilized worldwide”1
As blockchains emerge as sources of verifiable information, BitTensor sets itself apart by creating strong incentive mechanisms to push AI forward in a fundamentally aligned way. As such, this is our most high conviction investment.
Their subnets are also a great source of innovation. One such use case is Taoshi. They are leveraging the power of this distributed machine learning network to create highly efficient trading signals and financial indicators for traders.
“Nimble is a decentralized and composable AI protocol, aiming to leverage data in a privacy preserving manner and provide public large-scale AI models to the general public. It builds the fundamental AI infrastructure for fully decentralized data, model and network ownership. The network achieves this by building a marketplace in which participants — data contributorsand model builders — are rewarded to share their data and expertise.”2
In line with the thesis and ethos of BitTensor, Nimble Network is currently developing a similar project. They are still in their grassroots stage and participation is limited to running miners to increase their network’s latency and data collection ability.
“Morpheus is designed to incentivize the first peer-to-peer network of personal general purpose AIs that can execute Smart Contracts on behalf of a user, known as Smart Agents. Providing users open-source Smart Agents to connect to their wallets, Dapps, & smart contracts promises to open the world of Web3 to everyone.”3
This application is similar to the above mentioned projects, but distinguishes itself with the goal of creating automated pathways for user experience. In essence, they are utilizing the same thesis of distributed machine learning, but focusing more on how it can benefit the end user with interactions specifically tailored to web3 and crypto.
Their incentives will reward the users for providing compute and allowing the network to grow in capacity and capability.
“The ao computer is a world where countless parallel processes interact within a single, cohesive computing environment, seamlessly interlinked through a native message-passing layer. It is a burgeoning ecosystem of decentralized programs, akin to the World Wide Web, where each process, like a website, operates independently yet is intricately woven into a unified experience.”4
This project is exciting in so many ways. It’s goal is lofty, but is backed by an already established industry leader in Arweave (the permanent, internet encyclopedia) and therefore, has massive growth potential.
As of writing, they are in the process of incentivizing builders to craft applications on their supercomputer platform.
“The Gensyn network is the Machine Learning Compute Protocol that unites all of the world’s compute into a global supercluster, accessible by anyone at any time”5
Their thesis is simple: Compute is the new Gold. As a project, they aim to democratize access to compute power by distributing those resources across the globe, utilizing the combined power of network; Allowing anyone to participate. This strategy is in line with our own notion of where the future is going and harmonized in its scope.
As of writing, The Portal Fund has applied to support the network by supplying compute.
“Grass is the underlying infrastructure that powers AI models. By installing the Grass web extension, the application will automatically sell your unused internet to AI companies, who use it to scrape the internet and train their models. The result? You share in the growth of AI, earning a stake in the network for selling a resource you didn’t even know you had.”6
Grass is building a data availability layer which incentivizes people to provide their network power in a distributed and open way. By rewarding users for providing compute power, they leverage access to unused hardware capacity.
Participation is quite simple: install and run the app — https://app.getgrass.io/register/?referralCode=rupb8RX2jChPwQR
“AIOZ Network is a comprehensive infrastructure solution for web3 storage, decentralized AI computation, live streaming and video on demand (VOD), powered by people. As the insatiable global appetite for digital content continues to grow, the digital landscape is undergoing a transformative shift. The explosive rise in demand for reliable and scalable solutions for file storage, video hosting, and content delivery means that many legacy infrastructures are now struggling to keep up with the demands of what is quickly becoming an “online-first” generation.”7
Along the same lines as Grass, AIOZ has created a distributed network of compute which allows anyone to provide extra storage or hardware capacity to other users who are in need.
“Ritual is the network for open AI infrastructure. We build groundbreaking, new architecture on a crowdsourced governance layer aimed to handle safety, funding, alignment, and model evolution.”8
Ritual Network is building a distributed network for AI coprocessors, allowing projects to build machine learning models and applications integrated with autonomous agents. They have currently deployed their Infernet as a backbone for builders to start with (a library of off-chain computation).
“Numerai is a data science competition where you build machine learning models to predict the stock market. You are provided with free, high quality data that you can use to train models and submit predictions daily. Numerai computes the performance of these predictions over the following month and you can stake NMR on your model, to earn (or burn) based on your model's performance.”9
This project stands somewhat apart from the previous selection. They have created a game theory platform incentivizing humans to build better and better machine learning models. In part, it utilizes AI, but mostly, it shines in the above mentioned “Curation” category.
We can think of this as the first AI Hedge Fund managed by humans.
By gamifying their approach, they incentivize humans to create better and better algorithms. This aligns with our thesis that the future of our edge as humans will be in curation and discernment rather than data accumulation.
“Unrestricted AI with image/audio generation and large language models, powered by a decentralized GPU network for bias-free, agenda-free and censorship-free operations.”10
enqAI lives by an unwavering belief that generative AI should be uncensorable and open to everyone. They have already developed and deployed their uncensored LLM as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
With many other sub projects in the works, this platform has grown tremendously in the past few months and will likely continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.
Honorable Mentions
The opportunities are growing as fast as the developing projects are. It is our steadfast commitment as a Fund to be constantly curating and selecting for the emerging heavyweights, keeping true to our ethos of discernment as leverage.
Here are some of the other projects we are monitoring but as yet have not invested in.
Final Thoughts
This is an exciting time to be human. The rapid growth of technology will, in our opinion, allow for much more free time for us to be creative and to explore deeper connection.
As an asset management fund, we will continue to prioritize quality and give our investors the chance to create passive wealth from emerging possibility.
Thank you for joining us on this journey.
Here’s to us,
Human and Free.
https://www.taoshi.io/
https://www.nimble.technology/whitepaper
https://mor.org/about
https://ao.arweave.dev/
https://www.gensyn.ai/
https://www.getgrass.io/
https://docs.aioz.network/overview/introduction
https://ritual.net/about
https://docs.numer.ai/
https://enqai.com/